Readings on Fascism and National Socialism eBook

But, curiously enough, it was under Giolitti that
things suddenly changed in aspect, that against the
Giolittian State a new State arose. Our soldiers,
our genuine soldiers, men who had willed our war and
fought it in full consciousness of what they were doing,
had the good fortune to find as their leaders a man
who could express in words things that were in all
their hearts and who could make those words audible
above the tumult.

Mussolini had left Italian socialism in 1915 in order
to be a more faithful interpreter of “the Italian
People” (the name he chose for his new paper).
He was one of those who saw the necessity of our war,
one of those mainly responsible for our entering the
war. Already as a socialist he had fought Freemasonry;
and, drawing his inspiration from Sorel’s syndicalism,
he had assailed the parliamentary corruption of Reformist
Socialism with the idealistic postulates of revolution
and violence. Then, later, on leaving the party
and in defending the cause of intervention, he had
come to oppose the illusory fancies of proletarian
internationalism with an assertion of the infrangible
integrity, not only moral but economic as well, of
the national organism, affirming therefore the sanctity
of country for the working classes as for other classes.
Mussolini was a Mazzinian of that pure-blooded breed
which Mazzini seemed somehow always to find in the
province of Romagna. First by instinct, later
by reflection, Mussolini had come to despise the futility
of the socialists who kept preaching a revolution
which they had neither the power nor the will to bring
to pass even under the most favorable circumstances.
More keenly than anyone else he had come to feel the
necessity of a State which would be a State, of a
law which would be respected as law, of an authority
capable of exacting obedience but at the same time
able to give indisputable evidence of its worthiness
so to act. It seemed incredible to Mussolini
that a country capable of fighting and winning such
a war as Italy had fought and won should be thrown
into disorder and held at the mercy of a handful of
faithless politicians.

When Mussolini founded his Fasci in Milan in March,
1919, the movement toward dissolution and negation
that featured the post-war period in Italy had virtually
ceased. The Fasci made their appeal to Italians
who, in spite of the disappointments of the peace,
continued to believe in the war, and who, in order
to validate the victory which was the proof of the
war’s value, were bent on recovering for Italy
that control over her own destinies which could come
only through a restoration of discipline and a reorganization
of social and political forces. From the first,
the Fascist Party was not one of believers but of
action. What it needed was not a platform of principles,
but an idea which would indicate a goal and a road
by which the goal could be reached.